The Art of the Swindle
Predators, by and large, do not attack the strongest prey in the wild. They instead target the vulnerable, the very young, and the very old—the prey that is least able to defend itself.
Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, pursued a similar approach, according to its former employees in legal documents unsealed Tuesday.
“Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007.
.. “The Trump University instructors and mentors were a joke. Most of them were not experts in real estate and did not [have] experience in the real estate techniques they were teaching,” Nichols said. “They were unqualified people posing as Donald Trump’s ‘right-hand men.’ They were teaching methods that were unethical, and they had little to no experience flipping properties or doing real estate deals. It was a façade, a total lie.”
.. Corinne Sommer, the former manager of Trump University’s events departments, recalled how instructors in the second-level seminars, which cost roughly $1,500 to attend, would ask customers to call their credit-card companies to triple or quadruple their credit limit and max out their credit cards for real-estate investments.
.. “While Trump University’s advertisements claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact, based upon my experience, I believe that Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they could possibly buy on credit,” Sommer testified. “I recall that some consumers had showed up who were homeless and could not afford the seminars, yet I overheard Trump University representatives telling them, ‘it’s ok; just max out your credit card.’”
.. Trump University came to an end five years before Trump’s presidential campaign officially began. But both products rely on a similar three-part strategy. The first part is an emphasis on insecurity.
.. Trump University promised an easy path to wealth and success in the real-estate market just as the housing bubble was about to burst. (“Let’s get you enrolled today so you can start building a real estate empire,” reads one suggested line from the playbook.)
.. “I do not believe that Trump University taught Donald Trump’s investing ‘secrets,’” one former Trump employee testified. “Donald Trump came from a wealthy family and had resources at his disposal to purchase real estate—that is the secret—one the average consumer could not replicate.”